“Jeff.” This time Kathleen’s voice made no pretense at softness. This time even Jeff got the message. Across the table, Jenny’s hand reached for Jeff’s, her fingers giving his a squeeze. Chiding, or affectionate? Maybe both, I realized, when Jeff looked at her with a sheepish smile. Their communication—much of it conveyed by looks and touches—seemed surprisingly evolved for a pair of high-school kids. Was that because they’d had a brush with death? Or was it just because they were smart, good-hearted, and happy with one another? Whatever the reason, I was pleased for them.
“Show them,” Jeff said to her.
“Now?” Jenny blushed, suddenly looking shy.
“Sure, why not? Show ’em.”
“Show us what, sweetheart?” asked Kathleen.
“Oh, nothing, really,” she said. “Just . . . a couple of sketches I did in the courtroom today.” Jeff nudged her, and she reached down beside her chair and retrieved a small leather portfolio, setting it in her lap and opening the flap. She took out two pieces of drawing paper. “Janelle, one’s for you.”
“For me?” Janelle looked nervous. “Why?”
Jenny smiled. “You remember the drawing I did that day at the police department?”
“How could I forget?” said the woman. “Scared the crap out of me when I saw that awful face staring up from the page.”
“Not the drawing of him,” said Jenny. “The drawing of you.”
“Honey, I am talking about the drawing of me,” Janelle replied, drawing a good laugh from all of us. Then her face turned serious. “Sure, I remember the drawing you did of me. I looked pretty bad, too.”
“Not bad,” said Jenny. “Scared. Hurt. Sad. Mad.”
Janelle nodded. “Sounds about right.”
“Today I drew you again.” Jenny handed her the top sketch. I couldn’t have said which sprang to Janelle’s face first, the smile or the tears. She tried to speak, but quickly gave up. Instead, she laid one hand on her heart; with the other, she held up the drawing so we could all see it. There were still traces of hurt—more lines around the mouth and eyes than a woman her age should have, and a zigzag scar across the cheekbone—but mostly, the face gazing out from the page radiated courage and confidence.
“That is beautiful,” said Kathleen. “A perfect likeness.”
Jenny beamed at Kathleen and Janelle, then looked at me. “Dr. B, the other one’s for you.”
“Me? Why’d you waste a perfectly good piece of paper drawing me?”
“It’s not of you,” she said. “It’s for you.” She handed me the drawing, facedown. I hesitated, then turned it up.
It was like nothing I’d ever seen: A girl’s face—the unidentified strip-mine girl’s face—turned upward, toward the sky. Her features were serene, almost beatific; underneath them, the skull shone through, faintly but distinctly, in a way that somehow did not diminish or detract from the beauty of the face. She was shown in profile, one eye open wide, the other hidden by the bridge of the nose. But from that other, unseen eye grew a tree: a miniature but fully formed tree, its crown luxuriant with leaves and blossoms and songbirds. In the background, and on all sides, other trees grew, from ground that had once been scarred and barren, but had long since softened and gone to green. Beneath the ground, the trees were linked by a web of roots—roots that entwined delicately, seamlessly, with the girl’s golden hair; roots that somehow were the girl’s golden hair. Amid death, the image seemed to suggest—in spite of death, or perhaps even because of death, in some mysterious way I did not yet understand—there was life.
Even life abundant.
Author’s Note: On Fact and Fiction
Those of you who are astute at arithmetic may have noted that Dr. Bill Brockton, our fictional hero, is slightly younger—by some thirty years—than Dr. Bill Bass, who turned a remarkably youthful eighty-five in August 2013. Making Brockton so much younger has much to recommend it, fictionally speaking, as it allows Brockton (and us!) to be still employed, rather than retired.
But all choices have consequences, and in this book’s case—specifically, the case of the Body Farm’s genesis—Brockton’s relative youth has required us to fudge the birth year of the real-life research facility. In Cut to the Bone, we give that year as 1992. In real life, it’s considerably earlier, as well as more complex. The sow barn described in the book is quite real, but it was back in 1971 that it became the location for the Body Farm’s first incarnation: a distant, smelly place where decomposing bodies could be stashed before they were processed into clean skeletal remains.